


Hold You Tonight

by jenny_wren



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-09-21 02:11:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9527213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_wren/pseuds/jenny_wren
Summary: Ariadne is a new graduate student at Professor Miles sleep lab working on the experimental PASIV device where she meets the enigmatic Arthur





	1. Chapter 1

“And this is Arthur – ” With a flourishing hand her guide gestured to the back of the lab where a slim, very upright, grad student with slicked back hair was glowering at a suitcase full of wires – “but don’t bother talking to him. He’s an antisocial bastard who’ll just enjoy ignoring you.”

Arthur was in fact ignoring them although Ariadne could see his face tighten at the disparaging comment. She decided Tom wasn’t quite as charming as he liked to think. Teasing was one thing, showing your claws just because you could was another

Still, she shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the lab dynamics on first showing. There would always personality clashes and this lab seemed reassuringly orderly controlled and professional. Ariadne was so new to being a graduate student her bachelor’s degree still squeaked if she turned around too fast so she wasn’t entirely sure what she should be watching out for but she had done a few lab placements and one them had clearly been a complete car crash behind the scenes. There’s none of that strain here, just an intense focus on their work, which Ariadne liked, a grown-up lab for her grown-up degree.

Besides Professor Miles’ sleep lab was one of _the_ postings in the neuropsych world and he recruited Ariadne for this graduate slot over all the other applicants, and some of them she knew were guys who already had one doctorate but were willing to slog in a student position again for the chance to work with Professor Miles.

The glow that he picked her was never going to fade. She’d stay even if the lab was on fire (though not if it was literally on fire, probably anyway).

Anxious that her giddy excitement might be showing, she tried to flatten her expression into an appropriate level of interest as she let Tom usher her on and show her the experimental equipment which was all top of the range. Professor Miles had excellent connections to industry. Ariadne was getting her fees paid, and a very generous stipend. When she thought of the warnings about poverty-stricken students, and the way her fellow graduates all needed to keep their part-time bar jobs, she felt equally guilty and lucky.

Really she’d like a moment of privacy so she could run around the lab in celebration of having made it. Maybe turn a cartwheel or two.

But no, she was professional and organized and totally ate some sort of healthy nutritious breakfast and didn’t grab two pop tarts as she ran at the door because she’d changed her mind three times on what she should wear, which given her clothes are now inevitably mostly hidden by her lab coat was especially ridiculous.

She glanced nervously at the serious Arthur and wonders if he could sense her ridiculously frivolous thoughts. They were supposed to work together she knew. Professor Miles didn’t come right out and say it but she imagined the plan was she would take over Arthur’s job after received his doctorate. He’d been on the project since the beginning so that was four years, even if he started as an undergraduate he must be close to finishing his dissertation now.

Tom wasn’t a student, he said he wasn’t important enough for that, laughing in a way that meant he thought he was _more_ important than that. He worked directly for Dr Yusuf Mundhra, the project lead, although he wasn’t quite clear about his actual job title.

With just Arthur, Ariadne and maybe Tom, there were surprisingly few students. Usually a lab was bottom heavy, but here the other seven people were all already doctors. Which just proved Professor Miles could get the best, but it was strange. Even just for prestige reasons each of the doctors should have a couple of students to run around after them.

Shaking her thoughts away before she could make herself paranoid, Ariadne focused again on Tom as he bowed grandly at the center-piece of the lab, a complicated mess of machinery that looked like several computers had been smashed together with an operating theater and mutated into the sort of Steampunk device that would attempt to take over the world in Act III.

“And this is what it’s all about – the PASIV. The Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous device.”

Ariadne stared at the sprawling mass of components and tubing.

“Portable?” she checked. At the moment it looked portable in the sense the two six foot square tables it was spread over had castors.

“Well it will be. That’s Arthur’s job – if he ever gets his ass into gear.” Tom raised his voice for the last part of that, and Arthur perceptibly stiffened. Ariadne winced in sympathy and glared at Tom’s back. He was a good-looking man, handsome face with sandy hair and blue eyes, and a big and broad body with muscles and a deliberately casual stance that made her think there were bold black tattoos hiding under the nominal respectability of his lab coat. He was also, Ariadne couldn’t help thinking, a bit of a dick.

Tom twirled a thin IV tube through his thick fingers, then turned to flash his white teeth and grin charmingly at Ariadne, 

“Want to get hooked up and give it a whirl?”

Arthur was across the room so fast to Ariadne’s blinking eyes it was as if he’d teleported.

“No,” he removed the IV line from under Tom’s hand. “Nobody goes under without a full understanding of what they’re doing. Ethics 101.” _You scumbag_ went unsaid but implied.

“Hey Ariadne’s up for it.” Tom waggled his eyebrows at her. 

Ariadne wished she liked him better but couldn’t stop herself taking a step backwards in revulsion. She didn’t understand herself. Tom was objectively one of the most attractive men she’d ever met but it had taken a conscious effort to make herself like him and now he was making her skin crawl.

She wasn’t going to let that interfere with being a professional though. She smiled determinedly pleasant,

“It’s alright Arthur. Professor Miles explained it all to me.”

“He couldn’t possibly,” said Arthur, continuing on before she could attempt to defend Professor Miles, “There’s nothing that could prepare you for the reality of dreaming. But you can at least watch somebody come out before you agree to go under.” 

He looked at Tom, pure challenge in his dark eyes, 

“Are _you_ up for it?”

“Whenever you’re ready, _pretty boy_ ,” snarled Tom.

“You’re on.”

Ariane wanted to roll her eyes and say _men_ , but she could only fidget nervously because it wasn’t just big talk, it really did seem as if Arthur and Tom were doing this instead of having a knock-down, drag-out fight. Were in fact doing this as a way of having a knock-down, drag-out fight.

Because she was starting to suspect that Arthur was right and this was a bigger deal than Professor Miles made out. The way he had explained it, this was just conscious dreaming. Ariadne’d never had trouble dreaming, the occasional nightmare sure, but generally her dreams were disjointed movies that were interesting to remember and easy to forget. She was a bit anxious about being able to consciously dream, but that was what the experiment was all about.

Now she was thinking that was a massive understatement. Because the news that Arthur and Tom had agreed to ‘go under’ was apparently huge. The whole cluster of intensely focused doctors dissolved into a fluttering mass of head shaking and mass tutting. Tom collected a lot of slaps on the back that were nothing but badly disguised anxiety, and Arthur several would-be pats where hands were jerked back at the last moment. Ariadne could understand that, Arthur didn’t exactly invite touching.

The two men settled onto the lawn chairs that are hurriedly set up in the center of the lab. Tom sprawled out aggressively, Arthur lay back with the neat precision of somebody being measured for a coffin. The monitors were rolled over, hooked up and tested.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked one of the younger doctors, flicking at his long hair and tangling his fingers together with nervous excitement.

“Yeah,” said Tom bullishly. “Some people are way too precious about this shit.”

Arthur’s lips pulled into a not-smile. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Somebody had fetched Yusuf from his side office. He at least looked reassuringly unflapped as he strode forward to cluck his tongue and check over the set up, 

“So you’re doing this? You’re trying for a joint dream?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Tom, though he suddenly looked a little less sure of himself. 

Arthur’s not-smile widened, “By all means let’s not be precious about this.”

“Excellent. Tom, this will be your first attempt at a joint dream.” Yusuf flicked a couple of switches, “Would you please confirm for the record that you have read through the safety manual and warnings booklet.”

“Of course I have.”

“Excellent. Nash would you fetch me two copies of the disclaimer and testing agreement.”

The nervous doctor yanked two pieces of paper from a clipboard and had to go back for a third after he tore one in his agitation.

“Okay then boys please sign and date the agreements. Arthur you know the drill. Tom you need to sign box one, four and six. I’ll sign off boxes two, three, five, and seven.”

Arthur signed quickly and efficiently without looking at the words before passing the form back to the lead. Tom signed more slowly, and definitely paused over box six.

As Ariadne watched the paperwork ritual she felt the ground shift beneath her feet. Her right hand rubbed at her lip and she caught it in her left to still her most obvious tell. In another minute she’d be chewing at her fingernails and she hadn’t done that since she broke the habit in high school.

The thing was, she’d signed waivers for psychology experiments before, it was a bit of a hazard of minoring in psychology, but they were a paperwork exercise, and this wasn’t. She thought she was ready, but now it felt like somebody had taken the training wheels off her bike and everything had gone wobbly. She wanted to be back in class repeating nice simple experiments with raffle tickets and cans of coke. The Somnacin wasn’t just going to put the to sleep, it was going to let the PASIV hijack its way into Arthur and Tom’s _brains_. Who on earth had thought this was a good idea?

The edge of her finger nail snapped off and the rough edge scraped against her tongue. Wincing she tucked her hands away behind her back, right hand clutching her left wrist in a bruise tight grip.

“Good, good,” said Yusuf, collecting the forms and clipping them together. “Let us proceed.”

Nash darted forward and unspooled two of the long thin IV lines from around their reel.

“Give it here.” 

Arthur grabbed a line off Nash. He pulled a baggy out his lab coat pocket and peeled it open to get at the shiny silver needle. Slotting it in place, he squeezed the line to draw down the saline Somnacin mix, holding it up to the light and squinting at it until he was satisfied. He pushed the sleeve of his lab coat up past the crook of his elbow and quickly licked a patch of his forearm just above his wrist. His shoulders snapped back as he braced himself and then he jabbed the needle into the soft skin, quickly wrapping the velcro strap around his arm to hold it in place.

“Sterilization procedures, Arthur,” scolded Yusuf.

Arthur didn’t have to go to the effort of actually saying ‘fuck off’ because his face did it for him.

Yusuf sighed and turned his attention to watching Nash fuss as he hooked Tom up to the PASIV. Ariadne wriggled her shoulders uncomfortably. The whole thing felt more invasive than she was expecting.

Finally Tom lay back in lawn chair, shifting carefully so his arm rested across his chest without disrupting the line. He glared across at Arthur,

“Alright, let’s see what you’re made of.”

Arthur turned his head towards Tom but didn’t bother to open his eyes, 

“Bring it.”

Tom growled at the back of his throat and slammed his eyes shut, his whole face scrunching up with the effort.

“Ready boys,” said Yusuf, “And three, two, one.” 

He pressed the golden button in the center of the PASIV and it hummed into life. Arthur’s body shuddered but he’d managed to wedge himself in place so he didn’t actually move as the Somnacin surged through his nervous system. Tom, however, sagged and nearly tumbled onto the floor. Nash fielded him neatly, bundling him back into the chair.

Yusuf sighed and rubbed his hands over face. 

“Alright Nash, get back. Tom’s solo-dreaming has been improving, but a joint dream is always a jolt.”

“Not always,” said Nash and everybody turned to look at Ariadne and she squirmed under their attention.

“Well I’m not expecting Tom to be the exception to the rule.”

They stand there watching the two boys sleep as the tension built slowly until it was hard to breathe in the thick air. Ariadne fought the urge to jabber questions, or jiggle her legs, or swing her arms. She might be the new girl but she didn’t have to make it obvious. (Although she was a little afraid if she didn’t move soon she’d be stuck in place for good like a nightmare you couldn’t escape from.)

In the event it was Arthur who moved first. Abruptly his feet flexed at the ankles and he grunted softly. It was so anti-climactic Ariadne almost laughed from sheer relief.

“Uh oh,” said Nash.

“And here we go,” said Yusuf. “Malcolm, stand by.”

Malcolm, an actual medical doctor, elderly with a round face and round glasses yet somehow still sharp-edged, eased away from the small crowd.

“What’s,” Ariadne started to ask, unable to hold back any longer.

Which was when Tom jerked, arms starfishing as his muscles seized. She could see the tendons bunch in his neck as his mouth opened but all he could manage was a horrid gurgling sound as if his throat was too locked up to even scream.

Arthur’s feet flexed again.

Tom collapsed in on himself like a punctured balloon and started to shiver.

“Malcolm,” ordered Yusuf.

“Goddamnit,” swore Malcolm, rushing forward to press his hand to Tom’s throat. “Well, his heart’s still going so that’s something.” He unstrapped the IV line and yanked the needle from Tom’s wrist, tossing the line at the table in disgust. 

“Yusuf, this can’t continue. It’s starting to become less of an ethical question and more one of sheer practicality. We can’t have another – ”

“Malcolm,” snapped Yusuf.

“It’s true. And you must have noticed things have degenerated since – ”

“Malcolm!”

“Shouting at me isn’t going to make it any less true.” Malcolm pulled a prepared auto-injector from his pocket and stabbed Tom in the thigh. “Okay, if the sedative works we should pull through nicely. Otherwise we’re totally screwed.”

“Malcolm. It will be fine. And we have plans in place to move forward.” Yusuf glanced significantly in Ariadne’s direction. Ariadne flinched as everyone stared at her.

“Fine. But all the same girlie,” Malcolm glared at Ariadne as he monitored Tom’s pulse with two fingers against his wrist. “You come to me and get sorted for your own sedative dose before you even think about going under. And I won’t have any false modesty about your weight either. These things are finely calibrated. Understand?”

“Uh yes,” Ariadne nodded. She wanted to point out she had a name and it was not girlie but that seemed out of place when Arthur was still under and they weren’t even sure how the sedative was going to work on Tom.

Silence fell as they waited. The chattering of Tom’s teeth grew less and the hawkish sharpness faded from Malcolm leaving only moon-face joviality. 

Arthur’s breathing grew perceptibly louder. His feet twitched twice. Suddenly his eyes were open and he was sitting up.

“Arthur?” asked Malcolm cautiously.

Arthur made a scrabbling gesture with his free hand, then undid the strap around his wrist with a rip of velcro and pulled the needle free. He reached out again and Malcolm was there shoving a bucket into his hand. 

Arthur doubled over and threw up.

Everybody continued to watch as if this was an expected sort of a thing. Eventually Arthur stopped throwing up and just sort of panted and spat. Malcolm was taking Tom’s pulse again and nobody else seemed interested.

Ariadne took her bottle of water from her purse and walked over,

“Arthur, did you want some water?”

“Umph, please.” 

She uncapped the water and placed the bottle in his questing hand. He rinsed and spit a couple of times and then took a longer drink.

“Thank you.” He handed the bottle back to her, looking up at her with grateful dark eyes.

Ariadne stifled the urge to give him a hug. It seemed like he was woefully short of hugs but that wasn’t her problem and she was already being called girlie.

“Yusuf we should to get this one to a med unit,” said Malcom, “and you probably need to call some people.”

“Yes, yes. David, Simon, get the chair – ”

The two men collected a wheelchair Ariadne hadn’t noticed before, but she now realized was worryingly easy to access, and helped Malcolm load Tom into the chair and wheel him away as Malcolm kept one hand on his wrist to monitor his pulse. 

“ – Everyone else, we might as well call it a day. Back here tomorrow at eight for a post-mortem. Not literally,” he added, eyeing Ariadne who cursed herself for flinching. “I am going to call some people. Arthur lock up when you’re done.”

And then they all started to leave. Ariadne watched them filter away talking quietly together, and then looked back at Arthur still wheezing softly on his lawn chair. She wasn’t so sure she liked this lab anymore.

Crouching down by the chair, she smiled at Arthur,

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He visibly he gritted his teeth so he could sit up straight and prove it. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“Maybe I want to. Maybe I want you to wait for me when I’m the one throwing up.”

That seemed to relax him a little and when she held out the bottle of water again in silent offer he accepted it. He took two quick slugs of water and scrubbed one hand over his face.

“You can’t mean to stick around,” he said to the floor.

“What?”

He looked directly at her, “You’ve seen what we do. You can’t be crazy enough to stick around. This isn’t a game.”

“Hey,” she straightened her back, “not that it’s any business of yours but I signed up for this. I’m a professional. I can do this.”

He stared at her for a moment, then,

“Aw shit,” he slumped back onto the chair. “You were thinking of leaving and now I’ve gone and said that, nothing’s going to make you leave.”

Ariadne couldn’t quite decide whether she was insulted or touched.

“I can make my own decisions you know.”

He shook his head slowly, “I’m really sorry. I’m no good at this stuff. I’m not the one you want to persuade people.” He hunched forward so he could hug his knees.

She decided to give him a break because he was still pale and shaken up by whatever he’d dreamed,

“Arthur, it’s okay.” 

“No it’s not. Nothing is okay.” 

“Arthur?”

He shook himself violently.

“Sorry, I’m fine honestly.” He smiled, although it was a grim effort, and swung his legs down off the chair. His whole body swayed with the movement.

“Uh huh, you’re fine. Sur-r-re.”

“I am. I can’t stand up, true. But I’m fine.” He grinned over the sheer ridiculousness of that statement and Ariadne saw little hints of dimples in his cheeks.

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Anything, I don’t care.” She just wanted to talk to Arthur, to make a friend in this strange cold lab. “Tell me why you don’t like Tom?”

“You want to know why don’t like Tom?”

“Yes.” It had been a whim of a request, but now she truly did want to know. She was sure there was a reason, and she was already on Arthur’s side, she wanted to know.

He beckoned her closer like he wanted to whisper secrets, “You really wanna know?”

“Tell me.” Ariadne huddled in close, putting one hand on his arm for balance. The cold clammy feel of his skin made her cringe so she clutched tighter and wondered why there wasn’t a blanket. 

“I hate Tom because – you sure you want to know?” he grinned at her, and now he was deliberately stoking the tension, so she glared at him and shook the arm she was holding.

“Alright, alright,” he gasped. “I hate Tom because his teeth are too fucking perfect.” And then he was laughing and laughing.

“What?” said Ariadne, because seriously, what? What kind of reason was that to hate someone?

Arthur was still laughing and there was a horribly cracked timbre to it like broken edges were grinding together somewhere inside him.

“Arthur?”

He cackled, “They’re shiny and white and even and perfect. I want to smash every single one of them.”

“Arthur!”

Her agitation seemed to get through to him, because he finally stopped laughing and sat up a bit,

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said, although it wasn’t really. “You just worried me for a moment.”

“Sorry,” he said again. “You tend to come out of a dreams a bit addled and I wasn’t the people person to begin with. If he was… ” His head tilted slightly as if he was looking for someone, and one empty hand reached up grasping, before it closed on nothing. 

He shook himself sharply. “Sorry, you should go.”

She bit her lip and watched silently as Arthur’s head dropped and he shrank down into himself, small and alone. The sheer absence of someone wrapped around him was so intense that, if she squinted just right, Ariadne thought she would be able to see them.


	2. Chapter 2

After a while Arthur sighed again, 

“Better get going.”

“Okay,” said Ariadne uncertainly. She stood up and stepped back.

He patted his own shoulder and then grunted with the effort of lurching to his feet. He staggered, but managed to catch himself even as Ariadne jumped forward to try and help.

“I’m fine.”

“If you say so. I try not to argue with people who look like they’re about to collapse into a puddle.”

His lips twitched. 

“So is there anything I can help with to get this place straight?”

“If you could coil up the lines, there’s a sharps container over there for the needles, and I’ll make sure everything’s switched off.” 

Ariadne quickly bent down and picked up the IV tubing. Arthur swayed where he was standing but after a moment seemed to get control of himself and she was relieved to see he seemed steady on his feet as he walked around PASIV set-up shutting it down.

She dropped the final line in place, “All done?” she checked.

“All done,” Arthur confirmed. He was leaning against the wall, still too pale.

“I was going to ask if you wanted to grab a coffee and talk about the project a bit? But you look like you want nothing more than to go home to bed?” She asked, hoping he’d stop and talk with her anyway and feeling guilty because he did look bad. But this project was clearly not as advertised and she wanted more information before they wheeled her out of there pumped up with sedatives.

“Sorry,” Arthur shook his head and then looked like he regretted it. “Sorry, but you’re right.” He huffed at himself. “I should – no sorry, I can’t, I just want to curl up an die until tomorrow.”

“It’s okay.”

“No. Look, we shouldn’t, but if you swear to bring them back tomorrow, I’ll give you a couple of our early lab books to take home. That should get you up to speed at least a little and give you some idea of the theory, then tomorrow we can grab a drink and I can go through it in more detail.”

“You shouldn’t take notebooks out the lab,” said Ariadne and promptly felt like a prissy twelve year old.

Arthur laughed, “The amount things going on around here that shouldn’t happen, borrowing a few lab books is nothing. Just bring them back and we’ll be fine. Yusuf and Professor Miles have copies of everything anyway.”

“Okay,” she agreed, because she wasn’t a prissy twelve year, and because the sense of wrongness was growing all the time and she needed as many facts as quickly as possible.

The lab books were stacked neatly on a low shelf. Arthur pulled out the first one and then walked his fingers along another ten or so before pulling out three more. After a pause where he got his feet back under him, he walked over to her,

“Here you go. You need this first one for project specs,” he handed it to her, “but we wander off down an embarrassing number of blind alleys until about half way through this one when we start to get somewhere. Then we spin our wheels for a bit, you can skip though those parts, until it starts to come together at the end of this one, when the dreamer begins to manage nearly stable dreams.”

“Thank you.”

“If you want to thank me, invent a medical emergency for your mother on the other side of the country and vanish.”

“My mother is dead,” Ariadne said stiffly because it had been years and she’d still never figured out a way to smoothly slide that fact into conversation. Arthur didn’t go all uncomfortable like most people though, his eyes flared wide,

“Of fucking course.”

“Excuse me.”

“No dad either I’m guessing. Or any family at all really.”

“I have an aunt.” Sort of. “Not that I can see how it matters.” Professor Miles had asked her several questions about her family, but he’d been talking about his daughter Mallorie in France, so it hadn’t seemed weird, not like Arthur.

“It doesn’t. Sorry I’m being insensitive. I’ll shut up. We should go.” He stalked to the lab door and flinging it open and holding it for her.

Ariadne wanted to say, no, no, come back and talk to me like a normal person and explain things. But she didn’t think Arthur could actually manage normal person at the moment. Trying to hijack his brain had apparently rattled all his social filters loose.

She picked up the lab books and her purse. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Should do. Oh, and just so you know, when Yusuf says meeting at eight, he means everybody in the lab by seven-thirty at the very latest. If you want brownie points be there by seven.”

Ariadne beamed, “Thank you.” That was the sort of information she had been hoping for. Both because it was nice not to put her foot in before she’d even really started, and because it meant her lab partner was willing to help her avoid putting her foot in it – which when you got down to it was even more important.

So it was surprising the next day when she walked in smartly at five to seven (she was at the university coffee shop by six thirty) to discover Arthur wasn’t there. And still wasn’t there at seven-thirty.

He definitely hadn’t fed her duff information. Yusuf had inclined his head in approval when she walked in and said he was glad to see she had some idea of time-keeping, unlike certain people.

At quarter to eight it had become apparent the ‘certain people’ with timing issues was in fact Arthur himself. Yusuf, who was clearly designed to be prenaturally calm, was looking perceptibly tense. Most of the rest of team had given up on paying attention and were slouched back in their chairs: Simon, David and Nash were discussing last night’s tv, Luis and Gideon tapping intently on their phones. The doctor, Malcolm, paced the room in annoyance.

“That boy,” he growled finally. “He’s probably sleeping off a king-sized drunk.”

Yusuf sighed. “Tom isn’t even coming in.”

“Tom is still under sedation at Great Lakes. Arthur on the other hand – You have to speak to that boy.” 

“What did you want me to say?”

The doctor didn’t seem to know. He huffed and puffed some more, then, “I wash my hands of all of you.”

He took the last but one chair in their little half-circle around Yusuf. Fussily he settled himself and adjusted his glasses.

“Well go ahead and start for goodness sake. We’re on a schedule here from what I understand.”

Yusuf sighed more heavily, “Yes there is a schedule.” He glanced up at clock on the wall. “Alright, everybody – ”

The lab door opened and Arthur slipped inside at, Ariadne checked the clock, one minute to eight.

“– Arthur. How good of you to join us.”

“Morning,” said Arthur cheerily as if he hadn’t deliberately arrived as late as he possible could without actually being late. He wasn’t even out of breath, he must have waited in the coffee shop too. Taking the empty seat beside Ariadne and pulling out his pad and pen, he stared up at Yusuf with over-exaggerated attentiveness.

Nobody said anything.

“Shouldn’t we get started,” Arthur asked, so angelic he could have had a halo, “We’re going to be late.”

For a second Ariadne thought Yusuf looked almost fond, but he quickly smothered the expression with stern disapproval.

“Let’s begin. Tom unfortunately won’t be joining us – ”

“Oh _dear_ ,” Arthur vigorously projected devastation, “Is he okay?”

“Arthur tone it down. And Tom should be fine. They’re just holding him until they’re sure nothing’s shaken loose in his brain.”

Arthur’s eyes went very big, “He had a _brain_?”

“ _Arthur._ ”

“What?”

Yusuf rubbed his hand over his face and gave up, turning slightly so he was no longer looking at Arthur, 

“But Malcolm has run the tests and as far as we can tell, his brain scans are slowly resetting to their base level.”

Arthur sulkily kicked one foot against the floor in a parody of disappointment. Nash, sitting on Ariadne’s other side, made a desperate splorting sound as he tried not to laugh.

Yusuf appeared to seriously considering the therapeutic application of a hand to the back of Arthur’s head. Finally he shook his head,

“Have you got it out of your system yet? Because they’ll be here with Tom’s stand-in at oh-eight-thirty.”

“Already? Damn, I’ve met sprocket joints less interchangeable than these guys.”

Yusuf growled.

“No, I’m sorry, that was reflex. I’ll shut up and be good. Don’t worry.” Arthur hunched up apologetically as Yusuf stared at him for a long moment.

“Alright fine,” said Yusuf eventually. “Let’s move on. Gideon, we upped the Dexyl-benedrine in Somnacin mix, how did that play out?”

Gideon slipped his phone in his pocket and started in on an explanation where only one word in ten made any sense to Ariadne. Chemistry of the brain was not her specialty. Instead she looked at Arthur, who has subsided into a genuinely sulky huddle, arms wrapped around himself, and thought about the lab books she’d carefully replaced on the shelf at an opportune moment.

Project Somnacin had started as a doctoral thesis with Yusuf as the supervisor. Unusually the lab books were a joint effort shared by the two students. Arthur had been one of them, written in thin black biro the sharp pointed A of his signature was easy to identify. 

She wasn’t sure what the name of the other man was, the thick blue pen ran all the letters in his messy signature together, but Arthur referred to him as ‘he’ (and also _the idiot_ occasionally, which wasn’t very appropriate in a lab book, but the other man had drawn a sad little emoticon each time, which wasn’t very appropriate either. A couple of time Arthur obviously felt strongly enough about the whole thing to add a glarery emoticon to which an unabashed blue pen just added smoke coming out the little figure’s ears).

Blue pen was the psychologist of the two, while Arthur was the engineer building the device. They didn’t seem to have anyone to cover neuroscience or chemistry and spent a lot of time scrambling to find and interpret the data they needed. At one point Blue pen wrote, _I should just bloody retrain and call it done_. Arthur drew him a hug.

When things had started to come together a third writer joined in. Ariadne had read through the rest of the book before it dawned on her M Miles, _Mal_ , must be Mallorie Miles, Professor Miles’ daughter. Mallorie was in France right now with her fiancé, and she was an artist, so Ariadne had no idea how she had ended up helping out in a project that had clearly desperately needed at least two neuroscientists and a biochemist. But two years ago Arthur and Blue pen eventually managed to achieve a stable, repeatable one person dream with Mallorie Mills as the guinea pig.

Blue pen drew a firework exploding across a full page in celebration. Mal drew in a field of elaborately detailed little people cheering below. 

Arthur wrote – _you two do realize I can’t tear this page out, right?_

To which Blue pen responded – _Why else would this be fun?_

Arthur – _Fuck off and die. I bet Edison never had to put up with this shit_

Blue pen – _Poor man, you do have to feel sorry for him. Was he the one who nicked all his best ideas off Tesla?_

Arthur’s ranty response to that was so doubled over in the small space that it was impossible to make sense of. Blue pen just capped it all with a smiley face. The opposite page was viciously scored through and over the page was an aggressively precise and detailed experimental set-up entirely in Arthur’s handwriting. (The scolding effect was somewhat muted by the devil horns and fangs Arthur’s fine black biro gave the smiley face).

Ariadne wondered where Blue pen had got to. None of the team she’d been introduced to yesterday had been a psychologist. Blue pen might be on vacation but nobody had been mentioned as missing. She found it hard to believe anybody would voluntarily leave a project with as much potential as this one, even with all its oddities. So where was Blue pen?

Her thoughts were brought to an abrupt end when Yusuf clapped his hands together which also brought an end to Gideon and David’s argument on the optimal drug ratios.

“Let’s table that for now. Gideon I want your proposal for the ratios to use on our two new test subjects. David you will review.”

“But we should,” Arthur began.

“Arthur we have never managed to duplicate the all-out success you had with Mallorie Mills. Unless you have something to share – ”

Arthur went quiet and buttoned-down.

“ – then we’ll leave it the biochemists, please.”

Arthur shot Ariadne a look of apology. She had no idea why, which made her twitchy. She decided that later today Arthur was going to explain things or else. (She wasn’t entirely sure what the or else would be, but it would be _bad_.)

“Arthur might actually have a point for once,” said David. “I know we’ve tried the Miles combination without duplicating the results, but perhaps we should revisit it with our new subjects. We’d be able to monitor comparison reactions would be valuable regardless of the actual results.”

Ariadne squirmed a little at the way they were calling her a new test subject. It was more professional than girlie but she wasn’t liking it any better.

“Could you take that offline,” said Yusuf, “Because – ah, they’re here.” He went to answer department secretary’s knock on the door and ushered into the lab an important looking older man.

“Mr Browning, welcome to our lab.”

“Thank you Dr Mundhra. And may I introduce Jacob Hibbert who will be joining you while Thomas Stepney recovers.”

“Delighted,” said Yusuf without sounding delighted at all. He shifted slightly to block the newcomer’s view of Arthur and Arthur’s furious face. He seemed to be trying to kill Jacob Hibbert with the force of his glare.

Ariadne was staring too, because Jacob Hibbert was a husky, sandy-haired man with grey-blue eyes who looked enough like the absent Tom to make her wonder if cloning was an actual thing.

“Jacob, introduce yourself,” ordered Mr Browning.

Jacob strode quickly across the room, grabbed a chair and dragged it over and eased down cozily beside Arthur.

“Hey man, great to meet you, call me Jake.” He held out his hand.

“Lovely to meet you,” Arthur pressed a limp, sagging hand to Jake’s, making no effort at all to return the handshake. Then, as if he might not have made his point sufficiently obvious, he added, “Jacob.”

Jacob scowled, but quickly replaced the expression with a beaming smile. “Not a guy who’s easily impressed, eh, well give me time and I’ll crack it.”

Nash nudged Ariadne’s elbow and leaned over to whisper, “And the entertainment begins.”

Arthur after trying to convey his utter outrage with raised eyebrows, pushed his chair back and stood up,

“Excuse me, I need to get back to work.”

“Why don’t you show me your lab,” said Jacob. “Maybe we could grab a coffee and you could tell me about your research.”

Ariadne cringed to hear him using her line. Except she hadn’t meant it as a line while Jacob clearly did. He looked Arthur up and down and made it obvious he liked what he saw. Arthur looked like he was contemplating the easiest way to murder him and hide the body.

Yusuf coughed loudly, “Jacob, I’m afraid I need to go through some paperwork with you. Arthur can you get Ariadne’s allergy tests set up?”

Arthur nodded quickly, “Sure thing, come on Ariadne.” He kept looking relaxed but he was walking so fast Ariadne had to jog to keep up.

“Allergy tests?” Ariadne asked.

“We use a frankly worryingly large selection of drugs. A skin scrape test is a quick way to check for issues. Anything shows up and you’ll avoid that drug until we can run some more through blood tests.”

“You need me to take my shirt off?”

“No, fortunately the drug situation isn’t so bad yet that we need to use your whole back. Your forearm will be fine, if you’re happy with that? 

“Absolutely.” Ariadne quickly rolled up the left sleeve of her shirt. Arthur opened a cupboard and pulled out a small tray of brown glass bottles.

“I’m not medical doctor,” he warned, “I can get Malcolm to do it for you if you prefer?”

“You’ve done it before?”

“More times than I can count. Hexa-dramaline made Mal start to wheeze, now that was exciting.” Arthur scowled.

“Just from one scratch?”

“Yeah. We had to call an ambulance. Fortunately she didn’t go into full blown anaphylaxis. Though the hospital warned that future exposure might cause a stronger reaction. We threw it all out that night. Well I say threw out, what I mean is we took it back to main dispensary and then washed the entire lab down and sterilized everything. We were in a box room a quarter the size of this at that point but it still took us until three in the morning and we didn’t so much stop as fall asleep where we stood. Yusuf found us the next morning and made us go home. That was not a good day.”

“But she was okay?”

“Mal was back in the lab champing at the bit before we’d even woken up. She was fine. We were the ones who lost ten years off our lives. So, you know, it would be really great if you could refrain from reacting.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“And you’re happy for me to do the test?”

“It’s fine. How hard can it be to stab someone with a pin anyway?”

“You’d be surprised. Now hold still. It shouldn’t hurt as more than a slight sting. If it does, let me know straight away.”

Ariadne braced herself but it really was just several slight scratches and the quick drag of pen against her skin as Arthur worked his way through the bottles.

“All done,” he said finally. “You feel steady?”

“I’m tempted to do a couple of Darth Vader breaths – ”

He paused in the middle of a luxurious back stretch to glare at her.

“– but no, I feel no different.” She looked down at her arm and couldn’t particularly see any evidence of the test at all.

“Good. If you do feel at all shaky, or your skin starts to react, let me know immediately.”

“I will.” She rolled her sleeve back down. “So, uh, I can’t help noticing that the original name of this project was Project Soma.”

Arthur smiled and she could see the faint shadows of his dimples, “Don’t look at me. I’m not the Huxley fan.”

“So that was Blue pen. Who was Blue pen?”

“Blue pen.” His face scrunched up in confusion, then flattened back out into dour, “oh, you mean in the lab books. That wasn’t anybody important. Nobody at all.”

That was such a shoddy lie all she could was gape at him. Arthur whisked himself away from her, 

“I have to go check on my work, I’ll talk to you later.” And then he was across the room behind his suitcase of wires.

Ariadne stared after him and wondered what had happened there.

Not wanting to make her contemplation obvious by staring off into space, she ambled over to the lab noticeboard and started to go through the pinned up data sheets and computer simulation graphs, not even really looking for anything but trying to pick up a sense of things.

Carefully sifting through precariously hanging printed schedules and drawn out chemical chains, she found right at the bottom, pinned neatly in place with a thumb tack in each corner, a photograph printed out on white lab paper.

The photograph showed a smiling Yusuf and Mallorie Mills standing either side of two young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders. One of them was Arthur, dimples on full display. The other was broad-shouldered with scruffy brown hair, blue eyes and a wide delighted grin.

Below the photograph Blue pen had written The Dream Team!

She looked again at the man who must be Blue pen. At how happy he was and how close and comfortably he and Arthur were standing together.

Uh huh. That wasn’t anybody important. Sure, absolutely. Anything you say Arthur.

She glanced around to check nobody was paying her any attention and then quickly pulled out the thumb tacks, folded the photo up and tucked it away in her pocket. She was going to get to the bottom of this.


	3. Chapter 3

Ariadne was all set to go ask Arthur more detailed questions about what exactly the fuck was going on. But looking across the lab at him as he stood there, sharp and thin, back lit by the early morning sunshine so that his pale skin was almost translucent, she was suddenly struck by his fragility.

Arthur was kicking and fighting, sharp spikes all over like an angry porcupine but that was only to protect the soft, badly hurt part of him. Ariadne ran her thumb over the folded picture in her pocket and thought about how happy he had looked. Now it wasn’t just because she wanted to know that she was going to figure out what was going on but because she wanted to fix.

She glanced around the lab again and realized Arthur’s area was markedly separate from the computer desks everyone else was using. There was a big lab area set up just beyond the desks with test tube racks, cooling units and a fume cupboard. Distinctly relegated to the back of the room was Arthur’s lab bench with band saw, half a dozen fixed arm saws handing from hooks, plastic trays of screws and other bits of odd metal and heavy rolls of electric wire.

Ariadne reminded herself that hugging porcupines was not a winning proposition. She looked again at Arthur and the aching absence surrounding him.

Thankfully before her common sense gave way under the strain, Yusuf reappeared with Jake. 

Grateful for a distraction, Ariadne carefully studied Jake. It wasn’t her being silly, he really did look like Tom. She took a cautious peek at the picture in her pocket, and yeah, Blue pen looked like Tom too. Something weird was definitely going on with all the Tom-clones. (It better not be actual cloning, that all she could say, there was a limit to what she’d put up with and hijacking people’s brains to share dreams was her hard limit.)

“I’ll just go and make friends,” said Jake and he cheerily smacked Yusuf on the arm. Yusuf looked down at the offending hand with not so much outraged dignity but with a dignity so immense that it couldn’t be impacted by such minor things as offensive over-familiarity.

Jake bounded eagerly across the room and bounced up next Arthur.

“Hey man, how’s it going?”

Arthur removed himself to the other side of the lab bench, “I need to get these fresh specs in by the end of the week.”

“Oh Yusuf won’t mind if you take a bit longer because you’re showing me around.” Jake stalked him lazily round the bench, “You don’t do you Yusuf?”

Ariadne glanced across at Yusuf, in her opinion it looked like he did mind, quite a bit. She glanced back at Jake oozing into Arthur’s personal space and decided she disliked Jacob quite a bit too.

“No,” said Yusuf finally, “Arthur show Jake what you’re working on. Ariadne, Nash is our junior neuropsych, he’ll take you through what we’ve been doing.”

Arthur glared at Yusuf and Jacob impartially.

“Don’t be like that,” said Jacob. “You’ll warm up to me in no time,” and he nudged against Arthur like a cat demanding affection. “Now talk me through what you’re doing?”

Taking a step away, Arthur grabbed a lab stool and moved it between them, “Okay, take a seat and I’ll get started.”

Jacob laughed, raised one hand in defeat and perched himself on the stool letting his long legs sprawl out.

Arthur promptly moved around to the other side of the table.

“Oh my god,” said a voice in Ariadne’s ear, making her jump. She spun around, hands coming up in instinctive defense.

“Sorry,” said Nash backing away. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just, god, this looks to be even more entertaining than normal.” He laughed, and, when she looked confused, nodded towards Arthur, who was explaining something electrical and dodging Jacob’s attempt to stroke his hand.

“It’s not funny,” Ariadne snapped. Short and ‘cute’ like she was (Ariadne despised the word cute it was only suitable for describing puppies, and babies when you didn’t want to offend their parents by pointing out they looked like an angry troll) she suffered from people who thought that made her available for hugs whenever they felt like it. She liked to accidentally stand on their toes, it was particularly effective if she was wearing stilettos

“Ah, come on, it is kinda funny. Mr Fuck-off-and-die-in-a-fire having to play nicely with others. He may have met his match this time too.”

Ariadne wondered how soon she could feasibly stomp on Nash’s foot.

 

Although he apparently wasn’t much on the decent human being stakes, Nash was a good neuropsychologist and the whole idea behind shared dreaming was fascinating.

“Because it’s the shared dreams that has everyone excited,” explained Nash. “Controlling your own dreams, sure that’s fun and all, but sharing a dream, multiple people talking and acting together in a shared dream landscape, that’s where the money’s coming from. And I have put together a couple of papers speculating on the possibility of being able to access information from the dreamer’s mind. That go _a lot_ of interest in certain quarters.” He grinned smugly.

“But how does it work?”

The smug grin faded, “That’s the thing, it doesn’t work. We’ve seen it work. The original two students, our Arthur was one of them, definitely managed to share dreams.” He sucked his breath through his teeth, “Or possibly they invented telepathy, but that seems unlikely given later events.”

“Very unlikely.” Ariadne wasn’t doing telepathy any more than she was doing cloning.

“But after hooking themselves up to the PASIV they managed to share detailed complex information without talking to each other, or even looking at each other. We’d put one of them under before we even told the other one the message, and leave that one under while we woke the first one up. Bam!” Nash clapped his hands together. “Message got through. And even better, if we made it long and complicated, tiny errors would creep in just like you’d expect from a verbal message. I saw it all with my own eyes,” his voice rose high and frustrated, “but can we reproduce those results?” 

“I’m guessing no.”

“Exactly. No we cannot. I think they’ve even quietly tried with Mallorie Miles but still no joy. Maybe it was a complete fluke – which actually is unnervingly likely because, yeah – and we’ll never get those results again.”

“Is that really a possibility?”

“It better not be, they’ve sunk a lot of money into this. They will not be pleased if it’s a complete bust. They’re unhappy with the lack of results as it is.”

“Who’s _they_?”

“Oh, nobody important. They’re Professor Miles’ problem. We just need to come up with some answers to keep them happy.”

Ariadne sniffed, she was getting annoyed the constant evasions. Nash however didn’t have the same brittleness as Arthur that made her afraid to push in case he shattered in her hands. Nash was far too pleased with himself for that and she had no compunction about demanding answers from him. But at the same time ingrained caution had kicked in. While Arthur, for all his prickly defensiveness, didn’t seem a threat, she wasn’t sure about anyone else. Confrontation at the moment seemed a risky move, better to keep quiet and try and pump Nash subtly for information.

So she accepted the subject change like a good little girl and let Nash tell her all about the advances he was making in Neuropsychology.

The sudden shriek had them all spinning towards the back of the lab where there was a shower of sparks and the distinct smell of burnt plastic. Jacob, holding his stinging right hand close to his chest, swung a clumsy left-handed punch towards Arthur who jumped back out the way.

“What the fuck was that?” howled Jacob.

“That was a static shock,” said Arthur clinically, “caused by an overload of the secondary capacitor when the operator doubled the input value when they were distracted by somebody’s hand on their ass.”

“Bullshit,” Jacob snarled. “You did that on purpose.”

Ariadne saw the other men in the lab exchanging glances and looking vaguely embarrassed for Jacob, because tell them something they didn’t know.

“No, no, I was terribly distracted by all your virile masculinity,” Arthur blinked rapidly in a parody of flirtatiousness. He was standing quite differently, loose and open, and weirdly enough, he sounded distinctly British.

The sarcasm did seem to finally get through Jacob’s thick skull because he colored angrily and looked to Yusuf. Yusuf sighed.

“Jacob, if you want to try the PASIV tomorrow you need to get your allergy tests done, please go and see Dr Malcolm for them.”

“Oh, but can’t Arthur do them.”

Nash choked on his laughter, “Oh my god, how stupid are you.”

“Nash, quiet,” ordered Yusuf. He was smiling though, because Nash was right, Jacob had annoyed Arthur to the point he’d purposefully shocked him, and now he wanted Arthur to stick pins in him, the man was mad.

“No I can’t,” said Arthur, he’d gone back to standing poker straight. “You’re not a University employee. Liability.” He smiled sweetly at Jacob and walked away.

“Jacob, see Malcolm,” Yusuf repeated. “You don’t want to delay using the PASIV, do you?”

The answer to that was obviously no and Jacob stomped towards the doctor.

“Arthur,” said Yusuf, and then stopped.

Ariadne clutched her courage in both hands and scooted forward, “Arthur’s going to show me the best place to grab lunch.” 

Everybody stared at her.

Defiantly she looped her arm with Arthur’s and he came out of his surprise enough to relax and smile at her.

Jacob snorted, “You’re barking up the wrong tree there.”

Ariadne concentrated on looking as sweet and innocent as possible, “Arthur _doesn’t_ know a good place to get lunch?”

“No,” said Nash unexpectedly, “Arthur has no idea what makes a good lunch. He eats _marmite_ sandwiches. He picked up all sorts of bad habits from –” and then Nash screeched to a halt while the rest of room pretended he wasn’t there, as if he’d made some sort of terrible faux pas like mentioning chocolate cake at a dieting convention.

Arthur sniffed, “There is nothing wrong with marmite, just other people’s uneducated palates.” He sounded British again, terribly overdone British at that.

“That’s what – ” Nash started to say and three different people said,

“Nash!”

And Yusuf said, “Ariadne, take Arthur to lunch before Nash gets his foot any further into his mouth.”

So Ariadne started walking and after a second Arthur followed her. He seemed braced for intrusive questions, and she wasn’t in the mood to be told it wasn’t anything important, so instead she asked him about the available lunch options and tried not to wince at his dark, desperately grateful eyes.

 

Lunch was nice. Arthur, once he was sure she wasn’t planning to ambush him with awkward questions, relaxed enough to chat about dinner options, the University and the city in general. She was sorry to see him grow steadily more tense as they made their way back to the lab. There they found Jacob had disappeared on some sort of errand and Arthur promptly relaxed again and spent the afternoon talking her through how the PASIV both kept you sedated and amplified and reinforced the electrical impulses of your brain to stabilize your dream.

“And when we share dreams the PASIV integrates the electro-magnetic waves to create a shared dream space.”

“Or fries your brain,” said Nash mordantly from where he was pinning brain scans up against the screen for inspection.

Unexpectedly Arthur grinned, “Or fries your bran,” he agreed.

“You’re supposed to be encouraging me,” Ariadne scolded.

“I am encouraging you,” said Arthur and for a moment the shadows in his face were stark and clear.

She remembered then that what Arthur was encouraging her to do was run away. She was surprised to realize she was angry. She _liked_ Arthur. He was funny, kind, patient with her questions, and worried about her because there was something wrong and he didn’t want her trapped like he was. Something was wrong and it was making Arthur unhappy. Ariadne did not approve.

That night when she went home she made careful notes on everything she could remember, wrote herself a short bulleted list of things to investigate, then packaged everything else up in a big envelope and posted the whole thing to her old roommate who was a zoologist and five months into a year long placement in Samburu, Kenya, and had all her snail mail delivered to a PO Box ready to be picked up on her return.

She felt vaguely ridiculous doing so, because that was the sort of thing people did in spy movies, but well, it couldn’t hurt and hopefully Marie-Rosa would just laugh at her when she made it back. She kept the photograph though, because she thought it might be important, and because it was an image of what she was aiming for even if she had no idea of how to achieve it.

 

The next day it was time for the test subjects to be hooked up to the PASIV for the first time. Ariadne had grown no fonder of being called a test subject, she particularly didn’t like the way the team had a meeting and decided how the experiment was going to run without involving her.

“We will also use Arthur’s second test PASIV so that we can put both subjects under at the same time for a direct comparison.”

“Hey,” said Arthur, “I thought it was just going to be Ariadne. Jacob should have the chance to observe before being put under himself.”

“Aw that’s sweet, you’re worried about me.” Jacob flung an arm around Arthur’s shoulders. “But you don’t need to be baby, I’m not such a fragile flower.”

Arthur’s eyes flashed and he ducked out and under Jacob’s arm. 

“Alright, let’s get them hooked in. Ariadne come help me wheel the test PASIV over and I’ll help you get set up.”

Out-maneuvered for the moment, Jacob collapsed grumpily onto the nearest lawn chair. He tucked both hands behind his head, until Malcom grabbed one of them to insert the needle into his wrist.

Across the room, struggling to slide Arthur’s steampunk suitcase and assorted extras onto a trolley, Ariadne bit her lip.

“Is it really bad?” she whispered to Arthur.

“What?”

“The dreams. Are they really bad? You threw up!”

“Yeah, but that was mostly cause I was fucking with Tom. You’ll be fine.”

“What?” She thought about that for a second. She felt she should be outraged on Tom’s behalf, but mostly she was just relieved. “You really mean that?”

“Promise, I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“I can take care of myself,” the words came automatically, but the for first time ever she wasn’t sure they were true.

Arthur tilted his head and studied her, “You want my help or not?”

Biting back her instinctive denial of needing help, Ariadne took a moment to appreciate how out of her depth she was, and how scared she felt, so scared she couldn’t even admit it to herself or she’d have stayed curled up under her blankets this morning and never left her bed. Even if sleep didn’t seem all that much of a sanctuary anymore. 

Arthur was funny, kind and patient with her questions. She wasn’t going to make the same mistakes as everyone else and think Arthur didn’t know what he was doing. The PASIV was Arthur’s creation, she’d be stupid not to ask for his help with it.

“Yes please.”

And Arthur rewarded her faith by not making her squirm, he just said,

“Okay then. Whatever happens do your best to stay calm. Your subconscious is powering your dream, the more wound up you are, the worse it will get.”

“Alright, calm. I can do this.” She really couldn’t do this.

“Hey, I’ll be right there. You’ll be okay.”

Ariadne was not in the last bit confident about that, but she wasn’t backing down now. So she allowed them to connect her up to machines until she felt more like a biological sample than a person. Calm, she reminded herself, and smiled at Arthur sitting on a box of paper near her side.

Arthur smiled back, then his shoulders slumped and he sighed heavily,

“Back in a minute.” 

With slow reluctance he hauled himself to his feet and slouched around to Jacob laid out on the other side of all the equipment.

“Hi, look, um, the PASIV can be a bit tricky – ”

“I got this. I’m not some weak pansy-ass.” Jacob thumped his thigh with his fist. “It’s not going to take me down.” 

That sort of aggressive attitude did not seem likely to mix well with an experiment that required a calm subconscious. Arthur’s back flexed as he took a deep breath and tried again.

“Look, Jake, maybe we got off on the wrong foot but – ”

“It’s great that you concerned about me, but sweetcheeks, I got this.” And then he patted Arthur’s ass.

Arthur was back with Ariadne so fast she thought he must have teleported again. He sank wearily back down onto his box of paper,

“I did try,” he said quietly.

“You did,” she said and Arthur startled as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“Alright,” said Yusuf. “We all set? Malcolm, everything straight?”

“Good to go,” said the doctor.

“On the count of three, if you would be so good.”

“Close your eyes,” whispered Arthur and his slim long fingered hand wrapped around her cold one.


	4. Chapter 4

The lab was quiet and empty. It was late, the sun had faded and threw long shadows against the wall. Everyone must have gone home for the day and left her. Ariadne struggled to sit up in her chair,

“What happened? Where is – ”

Oh, and there they were. How did she miss them before. They were all standing around her in a loose semi-circle. Ariadne backed up until she hit a wall.

“What’s going on?” Something was wrong, it hung heavy in the grey air. She could feel the uptick of panic in the pulse below her jaw.

“What’s wrong? Where’s Arthur?”

The men just kept staring at her. She felt small and scared under their eyes, like a little lab rat.

“I’m sorry,” she faltered. “What did I do? Where’s Arthur?”

She looked around the lab for Arthur and help. A space cleared in the surrounding circle of men.

“Arthur!”

He was sitting slumped back in one of the lawn chairs. No longer in his neat coffin pose, one leg trailed to the floor and his arms were sprawled anyhow. Stark against the white of his lab coat was a dark spreading stain, and in the center of his chest was a hole, its emptiness glistening gory red.

Ariadne gasped, too shocked to scream, hands flying up to cover her face.

The lawn chair creaked as Arthur sat up.

Ariadne sobbed, trying to back away but her feet would no longer obey her and she was frozen to the floor.

Suddenly Arthur’s eyes opened, staring at her blank and dead,

“They cut out my heart.”

It was there on the table beside him. A soft red pulsing thing. 

“They want to replace it – ” Arthur showed her the object in his cupped hands. Ariadne stared in horror at a mechanical mess of grinding cogs of tarnished copper, dented dull brass sprockets and the rusty click of chain. She could imagine it wedged in Arthur’s chest turning the skin green and black, rotting from the inside out.

“You can’t,” she stammered.

“It will kill me,” Arthur agreed. He sounded as distant as an empty sky. The other men were pressed around them in a tight circle. Ariadne shied away from a too close body and a hand clutched to drag her back.

“Arthur,” she cried, scrambling closer.

Tilting his head he turned his hollow eyes on the other men. He blinked once and then smiled. 

“I don’t like you,” he informed them. 

They ignored him, closing in on them both, hands reaching out greedily.

“I don’t like you _at all._ ”

A harsh screeching sound rolled through the world, shuddering along Ariadne’s bones – and the first of them exploded into a shower of red mist.

Ariadne screamed as blood spattered across her skin.

The world screeched and shook.

Red mist was all around her and she screamed louder – and then the world tumbled out from beneath her and she was falling.

Jerking mindlessly, she fought against the hands that held her. Arthur was telling her, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” but she wasn’t. “Look at me,” Arthur insisted, “look at me. You’re okay.” 

She cringed away, not wanting to see the mess of his chest.

“Hey, look at me.” He took her chin in one hand and turned her head towards him. Steeling herself, she looked and,

“oh God, you’re okay,” she pressed a wondering hand to his intact lab coat and whole chest.

“I’m fine,” he said but she knew it wasn’t true.

“They cut out your heart,” she whispered with remembered horror.

Startlement flashed across his face, “Well yes,” he said, “but I’m working on it.”

“What?” Ariadne gulped and swiped at her snotty tears with the sleeve of her lab coat so she could see him properly.

“Nothing,” he reassured. “Now let’s get you sitting up.” His face had gone calm, all emotion tidily tucked away.

“I don’t understand.”

“It was just a dream Ariadne. Just a dream.”

A dream. She remembered now. It was just a dream nothing more than that. Except it wasn’t just a dream not really.

Before she could sort her tangled thoughts into some sort of order, there was a thump as a bag landed on the floor beside and Dr Malcolm said,

“Let me check on her.”

Ariadne flinched away from the dry, papery hand that reached for her wrist.

“It’s okay,” said Arthur, “he just wants to be sure you’re alright. Here, let me help you with the blood pressure cuff.” He took the cuff from the doctor and slipped it over her wrist and helped her adjust it over her upper arm. The solid pressure as it inflated was actually reassuring. She clutched the lapel of Arthur’s coat and pressed her knuckles to his solid chest.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I never usually have this much trouble throwing off a dream.”

“Somancin hangover,” said Arthur.

Dr Malcolm tutted, “She’s doing very well.” He scribbled a couple of figures down on his pad and then a penlight was shone in Ariadne’s eyes. 

“Minor disorientation,” he noted, and Ariadne wanted to say, you try having lights unexpectedly blinding you. The sharp pain in her finger made her yelp.

“Careful,” Arthur warned.

“Hush up now. It’s just a check on her blood sugar levels.”

Ariadne cringed under all the speculative, assessing stares. For a disorientating moment, she wondered if she’d actually turned into a lab rat and one hand curled over her nose to check for whiskers. 

“First of this batch to be able to wake themselves,” continued Dr Malcolm. “Very interesting. Lucky you caught her Arthur, wouldn’t do for her to bang her head.”

Ariadne jolted upright. That wasn’t what happened at all. She hadn’t woken herself up. She’d fallen. Fallen, it struck her, when Arthur jerked her dreaming body out the chair in the guise of catching her.

“Your pulse started to go wild,” said Arthur carefully, “and your arms were shaking, then you nearly threw yourself out the chair as you woke up.”

Ariadne opened her mouth to correct him and then thought better of it. She didn’t know what was going on, but she trusted Arthur over the rest of them. She had a feeling ‘first person in this batch to wake from their nightmares’ translated to, ‘first person in this batch that Arthur actually likes’.

She looked across at Yusuf, who seemed to be on toleration grounds with Arthur and saw his expression was pained. When she caught his eyes, he shook his head slightly. So Yusuf was aware of what Arthur had done and was letting it go.

What was going on?

Before she could do something stupid like ask, the attention snapped to Jacob’s chair as he started to twitch. 

“And here we go again,” said somebody.

Ariadne felt vindicated in her belief she hadn’t fallen out of her chair on her own. Jacob’s face was twisted up and the tendons flexed in his splayed out arms but he didn’t move. It was as if he was held down by an impossible force.

“The somancin mix depresses all motor movement,” said Arthur quietly in her ear. 

“If you say so. But Jacob is definitely moving.”

“If a dream is intense enough it can override the brain’s natural suspension of movement. But you can’t make the somancin strong enough to freeze all involuntary movement without also suppressing the breathing reflex.”

Ariadne snorted at the deadpan explanation, “Yeah, I can see would be bad.”

Arthur grinned at her, “So the somancin does just enough to prevent major movement and stop us damaging ourselves.”

“If you say so.” She looked again at Jacob. His body was one long silent scream. She wasn’t convinced about the not damaging himself thing even if none of the wounds were on the surface. “Can’t we wake him up?”

Arthur shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head towards the others, who were all busily taking notes.

“Oh,” said Ariadne, “Jacob’s just a lab rat too.”

“We’re all lab rats here. The trick is to try and get into the control group.”

“Jacob is not in the control group.” There was nothing as benign as a placebo surging through his veins.

“No. Poor sod.”

They watched for long minutes until finally Dr Malcolm said, “Enough, his heart rate’s through the roof.”

“Wait,” Nash put a restraining hand on the doctor’s arm. “He’s metabolizing the hydroxeline twice as fast as average. We need to see what happens when the ratio to salisicic acid is compromised.”

But Nash was not going to find out, because Arthur had already slipped away from Ariadne and was kneeling by Jacob and undoing the strap around his wrist. With the needle pulled out, he took a further two harsh rattling breaths and sat up.

“You okay?” said Arthur.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Sound okay to me.”

“Fuck.”

“Bit repetitive but okay.”

“Fucking hell.” Jacob glared at Arthur with fierce dislike but Arthur was already gliding away to make room for Dr Malcolm to run his checks. 

Somebody shoved their way into Ariadne’s personal space, 

“Dr Fanshaw,” he said and she was so off-balance she didn’t realize immediately he was introducing himself not making a mistake with her name.

“Ariadne Oliver.” She smiled at him as politely as she could manage, backing away from the almost physical presence of cigarette smoke around him. He was whippet thin with nicotine stains on his long fingers and black thick rimmed glasses that were so ugly they had to be super stylish.

“’ere, this form needs to be completed regardin’ the contents of your dream,” he had rough English accent, like one from a gangster film. He thrust a double paged booklet at her. “It should be completed as soon as possible.”

“I’ll get right on that,” she said to make him go away.

“Good.” He strutted off to bullishly loom over Jacob. “We need to get this form completed. Ariadne is doing her own but I’ll ‘elp you with yours as you seem right out of it.”

Jacob stopped looking murderously at Arthur, and started looking murderously at Fanshaw instead. Arthur reappeared at her side.

“Hi, I’ll give you a hand with the form if you like. It can seem complicated to start with.”

“Thank you.”

They drifted quietly away to Arthur’s end of the lab and he handed her a stool and found her a pen.

“So advice?” she asked as she settled down to complete it.

“Oh that’s easy,” he said. “Lie.”

“Lie? But that’s – ”

“Unless you want detailed questions about your subconscious thoughts.”

“Uh,” she stalled, because no she didn’t, but at the same time you couldn’t _lie_ on an official report.

“We, um, weren’t quite as accurate as we could be from the start. There are some things you can’t put into lab books.” There was flush of red along Arthur’s cheekbones and up to the tips of ears. Ariadne thought about what she’s surmised about his relationship with his original collaborator, and, oh, she could feel herself blushing in sympathy.

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “So we were okay when Fanshaw came in with questionnaires and feelings charts and whatever. It got to be a bit of a game. We made up some outrageous stories. E –, someone did their best to convince Fanshaw they had a repressed sexual desire for their older brother.”

“Ugck,” said Ariadne, face wrinkling up in disgust.

“It would be more ugck if they actually had an older brother.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep only child, no siblings at all.”

“Okay, that’s kind of funny.”

Arthur shook his head, “I’m surrounded by mad people.”

“What did you do?”

“I reported very boring dreams, thank you all the same.”

She squinted at him.

“I’m not enough of a psychologist to drip feed delusions to Fanshaw, I spend a lot of time being eaten by tigers.”

“Being eaten by tigers is boring?” Ariadne meant the complete opposite, but Arthur seemed to take her seriously and hunched up defensively,

“Hey, sometimes it’s leopards. Or sharks. Or once a red truck.”

“A red truck ate you?”

“Okay, that wasn’t my idea, I’m told I have no imagination, but still.”

“You have plenty of imagination from where I’m standing. I can see I’ll have to put some effort into this.”

“You don’t have to. You don’t have to lie either, if you don’t want to.”

Ariadne shook her head, “No I get what you’re saying. I hadn’t thought about it properly. There’s no way I’m telling them what I dreamed about.”

She chewed on her pen for a bit and then settled down to write down a highly dramatic dream that was admittedly heavily cribbed from a movie, but she was pretty sure nobody here would have watched the Powerpuff girls.

Arthur had gone back to fiddling with his gizmos, but he looked up when she’d finished and she pushed her script across the table to him. He read it carefully, brows drawing together in a cross little frown just above his nose.

Finished, he gave a crack of laughter and handed it back, “Very sneaky.”

“Damn, I thought I was safe. You don’t look like a fan.”

“I’m not. _Someone_ caught the cartoon once when they were high at three o’clock in the afternoon and thought it was most hilarious thing they’d ever seen and insisted on buying the whole series.” 

His reminiscent grin faded slowly into a dark scowl and he returned to his gizmos.

Ariadne went to hand in her work, feeling very like a seventh-grader again. Fanshaw took it without even looking at her. He was busy quizzing poor Jacob, who appeared to have been too out of it to have thought of lying and was squirming uncomfortably as Fanshaw pressed relentlessly for more.

Everyone else had settled back into their jobs, analyzing the new data in relation to their specialty but they weren’t too busy to occasionally turn a speculative glance Ariadne’s way. She rubbed her nose because it felt like those whiskers that didn’t exist were twitching in agitation.

“This job is going to send me completely round the twist.”

She retreated to a bit of spare desk near Arthur and that worked because they all avoided noticing Arthur if they could.

 

The next day Ariadne decided it was time to put on her big girl panties – she was not actually a lab rat, even if she felt like one. It was time to take back the initiative.

She spent the next few days watching and listening. Taking advantage of the general disregard of her, she worked her way around the room conducting her own quiz. Nobody particularly wanted to talk to her, but everyone enjoys expounding on their research so they were more than willing to talk at her and she managed to slip in a few questions as she went.

Sutton, who had big round eyes that looked one sneeze away from popping out his head, and Desimmons, a tall man with arms and legs so long they made him clumsy, both tried solo dreaming using the same somancin mix she and Jacob had used. Sutton had to be woken as his blood pressure rose to dangerous levels and his breath started gurgling in the back of his throat. Desimmons managed to last through the full allotted ten minutes before the somancin drip was tailed off and Arthur played Born in the USA to wake him up.

Desimmons sat up abruptly, eyes blinking blindly, “Oh God, oh God.”

“You alright?” asked Arthur, eyeing him carefully as if he could spot the mental cracks.

“God in heaven preserve us.”

“Was kind of looking for a yes/no answer.”

Desimmons looked at him, “Arthur you are the craziest fucker I’ve ever met, to do that to yourself.”

“Says the man who just had his own session.”

“You did it raw. Every day. For weeks. I don’t see how you can be sane anymore.”

Jacob smacked Arthur on the back, “My man here is hardcore.”

Arthur went terribly still for a moment but somehow managed to resist the urge to commit bodily harm. He ducked out from under Jacob’s arm, and said,

“Fanshaw you should pass him one of your recording books.”

“Awright, awright. What did you dream about Desimmons?”

“Nothing much.”

“You can tell me, nuthin’ I ‘aven’t heard before.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Just school. Waking up was the jolt. It was so real.” He sounded impossibly wistful but when his dream sheet was typed up the dream he’d reported was a perfectly boring one about a middle school project. (Sutton’s dream, on the other hand, was dramatic and horror-filled as one could want but Ariadne had read Lovecraft and could recognize his source material.)

The lab started to discuss making another try at running a joint dream. Arthur as the only successful joint dreamer they had available was obviously required but there was a lot of debate about whether Ariadne should be his partner, or Jacob. Ariadne because she’d done okay with the solo dream (and because Arthur was willing to put up with her, although nobody came right out and said that). Jacob because some unspecified ‘they’ would expect Jacob to be involved (and because Nash was a malicious bastard and wanted to see the fallout). The people who were not asked for their opinion were Arthur, Ariadne and Jacob. Ariadne could feel her whiskers twitch.

She slipped away to work on her own project. She had two lists of the lab personnel. The first was their skill with the PASIV and was by order of ability. The second was by Arthur’s fondness for them. This was harder to gauge (if asked she was sure Arthur would say he hated everyone) and she went mostly by the amount of scorn his name provoked.

She was not surprised to have Yusuf at the top of both lists. Apparently he was a solid but unflashy dreamer who reported boringly repetitive dreams of walking around a rainy cityscape. Ariadne thought he might not even have been lying about that, he was clearly sharp enough to make up something more exciting if really was making things up.

In fact the two lists pretty much matched her expectations that ability to use the PASIV was directly co-related to how much Arthur liked you. The only outlier was actually Dr Fanshaw, who mostly ignored Arthur and was ignored right back. Fanshaw however was much worse at dealing with the PASIV than Sutton (mutual sniping) and Mortimer (Arthur had deliberately given him the wrong coffee order leaving him splurting a mouthful of too bitter black coffee across his work station).

Ariadne chewed on the tip of her pen and studied her lists.

Somebody lent over her shoulder,

“Well done,” said Nash. “There is a brain behind that pretty face.”

Ariadne’s hand flexed, but there wasn’t anything she could say that wouldn’t get her labelled, hysterical, oversensitive, or at best, unable to take a compliment, so she ignored it.

“Did you want something?”

“No, just admiring your detective work. You know most of the rest still haven’t figured it out.”

“And you haven’t considered being nicer to Arthur?”

“I’m not going to suck up to that humorless ass. I just avoid testing the PASIV. Better plan all round.”

“If you say so.” Ariadne was beginning to understand why Arthur had sunk to sabotaging coffees. It was probably better than punching people.

“Now I’m sorry to say,” he didn’t sound sorry at all, “but you’ve made one serious error there,” he nodded towards the ‘Arthur likes’ list.

“Oh?”

“Of course, it’s not really your fault. You weren’t here from the beginning.”

“Oh?”

“Eames,” said Nash with satisfaction.

“Husband and wife design team,” said Ariadne, “particularly famous for the Eames chair. Why are we suddenly playing Jeopardy?”

“Not those Eameses. Eames-Eames.”

“And who is Eames-Eames?”

“Arthur’s Eames.”

“Ohhh,” enlightened Ariadne made the connection with the mystery collaborator of the lab books. “That Eames.” 

Eames was blue pen. She finally had a name.

“Yep. That Eames. He and Fanshaw couldn’t stand each other for some weird English reason nobody else understood. Arthur says it was because Fanshaw’s name is spelt Fetherstonhaugh but that seems a ridiculous reason to hate each other. But then they are English.”

“It doesn’t matter why they disliked each other.” Ariadne crossed out Fanshaw’s name on the list and prepared to downgrade him. She paused as she tried to work out how Fetherstonhaugh was spelt but decided to stick to Fanshaw.

“But it’s weird,” Nash whined. “They never even argued. Eames used to come in and smack him on the back and say, ‘ello me ol’ china, and Fanshaw used to get madder than a wet hen.”

“But that’s being friendly, right?”

“In British yes. But Fanshaw got madder and madder, then one day it looked like he was going to thump Eames but Eames just said, You sure you’re up for it. So Fanshaw complained to Yusuf that Eames was harassing him and Yusuf said, no he wasn’t and did Fanshaw really want to continue that line of conversation with him. Fanshaw went red and shuffled his feet. Yusuf told Eames to knock it off and Eames said fine. And that was that. So weird.”

“But if it was all sorted out, why would Arthur – ”

“Oh it wasn’t sorted out. Fanshaw hated Eames like fury, and Eames, I think he thought it was funny actually. I don’t believe Arthur understood it at all, like I said, he thought it was about how Fanshaw’s surname was spelt, but he was always on Eames’ side.” Nash shook his head like this was inexplicable.

“Nash,” said Ariadne. “What happened to Eames?”

“Oh, er, nothing, nothing at all.” Nash shook his head and took a quick step backwards. It looked like he’d abruptly remembered Eames wasn’t supposed to be talked about.

Ariadne sighed, “Do you see anyone called Eames hanging around? No. Ergo something’s happened to him. What has happened to him?”

“Err, well, he, um, he got a better offer and moved to a different university.” Nash nodded his head firmly as if that somehow made it more convincing.

She stared at him, “Exactly how stupid do you think I am? Wait, don’t answer that. The work in this lab is going to revolutionize brain science, nobody can find a ‘better offer’.”

Nash ran a sulky hand through his hair, “Well you explain it then.”

“What?”

“I don’t care what you think. Eames isn’t here, and everybody knows not to ask any questions. Hell, maybe he got tired of putting out. Even being in this project wouldn’t be worth waking up to that prissy face every morning.” He sneered across the room at Arthur, who was looking rather prissy at just then, but that was because Jacob was plastered to his side having another go getting Arthur to warm up to him. Jacob somehow remained utterly oblivious to the fact Arthur was only going to warm up to him if he was allowed to set him on fire. 

Ariadne smiled tightly at Nash, “Thank you for your help. I need to get on with my work now.”

He laughed, “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to do anything but show up with your pretty smile.”

Ariadne was going to get Arthur to teach her how he messed with PASIV and she was going to roar through Nash’s dreams like a banshee. She ducked away and walked across the room to the shelf of lab books, grabbing one at random to hide behind.

Arthur appeared suddenly beside her, “You don’t need to read that.” He took the book from her gently and tucked it away back on the shelf. “It’s embarrassing people reading about the mess we made of things to start with. Come over here and let me show you how the PASIV works.”

“You mean help you protect your dubious virtue from Jacob.”

He grinned, “My virtue is not dubious.”

 

It was only later that it dawned on Ariadne he’d deliberately distracted her away from the lab books. There was something in there he didn’t want her to see. He’d already told her the descriptions of the dreams weren’t strictly honest, the books he had already shown her were not exactly models of professionalism so he couldn’t be trying to hide that – which all led to the question, what was he trying to hide?

She didn’t want Arthur to know his distraction plan had failed, and she didn’t want anyone to let on to Arthur that she was snooping, so she decided to go back to the lab that night after everyone had left. That would give her plenty of time with the lab books with no one to bother her. Once she found whatever it was she could take photocopies and investigate further.

After dinner, she headed back to the coffee shop just down from the science building and hung around until closing drinking too much hot chocolate. It had grown dark outside and she was nervous now, although she wasn’t doing anything wrong, it felt wrong, like she was trying to trick secrets out of Arthur.

She hung on in the coffee shop until the barista stopped standing behind her and sighing impatiently and started putting the chairs on tables so they could mop the floor.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “But if you really are sorry you could stop hanging around getting in my way and just go apologize to your boyfriend already.”

“I don’t – ”

“Or girlfriend. Or dog. Cat. Whatever.”

“I,”

An aggressive swish of the mop brought the grey draggly strands perilously close to her sneakers.

“Sorry, I’ll go.”

“Thank you,” he said, heart-felt. “Between you and hazelnut mocha I thought I’d never get out of here.”

Hazelnut mocha was Arthur’s drink. Ariadne had been tucked away in the back, hiding behind her laptop. She hadn’t been paying any attention to the other customers, but maybe –

The mop swished again.

“Bye,” she said hurriedly. She’d figure out what Arthur was up to later. For now she had lab books to check up on.

She quietly pushed her way through the doors and into the silent corridors. She took the stairs, her sneakers squeaking loudly against the floor and the automatic lights making her jump as they clicked on blazing away the gloom.

When she reached the lab she pulled out her key, but to her surprise the door was already open. Had it been left unlocked or – there was a faint glow from Arthur’s corner of the lab. Turning the door handle as quietly as she could she eased the door open and slipped into the lab.

The lab was dark except for the spotlight over on Arthur’s bench. Arthur had dragged one of the chairs over to his mess of wires and valves and was laid out neatly as his PASIV hummed, pumping somancin through his veins.

Arthur didn’t move, just lay there still as death, skin blue-pale under the cool fluorescent light.

Suddenly frightened, Ariadne ran into the light and reached out. The impulse to shake him awake crumbled away and when she touched him it was just with two shaking fingers. The skin beneath her touch was warm and she gasped with relief. Resting her knuckles lightly over his mouth she could feel the heat of his breath.

And okay, it was okay. Arthur was fine. She was letting her nerves run away with her. It was okay. She backed away a little into the shadows feeling shaky all over and pressed a trembling fist to her mouth. 

If her time here had taught her anything it was that the PASIV was dangerous. Arthur shouldn’t be dreaming on his own. But at the same time he’d undoubtedly done it before. Really he was the only person qualified to make any decisions about PASIV use. And he must have some reason for testing the new model of PASIV alone in the dark instead of in the safety of the lab environment under the doctor’s supervision.

Not sure what to do for the best, Ariadne retreated to Yusuf’s tiny cubicle office where she was out of Arthur’s immediate line of sight, but could still keep an eye on things. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she settled down to wait.

She didn’t have to wait long. The sound was faint at first, just enough to break her from her absent doze, then grew louder until she could make out the triumphant horns.

Arthur twitched.

It wasn’t a song she recognized, and when the singing started it was in a foreign language. French probably. Mallorie Miles had gone to France, and Arthur had said once that they practiced French together.

Arthur sat up abruptly and smacked at the ipod.

“Shut up,” he said into the loud silence. “You don’t know anything.”

He pulled his legs in tight against his chest, wrapping his arms around them, and pressed his face into his knees. His shoulders shook and it took Ariadne a moment to realize it was because he was crying.


End file.
